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Firstsource’s MedAssist faces federal collective action suit over non-payment of overtime

October 17, 2017
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At Firstsource, it’s about more than the work we do. It’s also about the positive outcomes we help to create. “

This is how Firstsrouce introduces its healthcare provider division MedAssist’s edge to prospective clients and employees through its website. But in an FLSA collective action suit recently filed against Firstsource Solutions USA, LLC d/b/a MedAssist in Kentucky, two former employees have alleged that the company has routinely been making its hourly-paid healthcare provider employees including patient service representatives, floaters/trainers, and team leads work longer than their paid hours.

They alleged that MedAssist systematically makes them work off-the-clock and does not pay them any overtime compensation.  The healthcare provider employees are now seeking to recover the allegedly unpaid overtime pay as well as to put a stop to the company’s de facto policy of routinely requiring off-the-clock, unpaid work.

MedAssist is the healthcare provider division of Firstsource Solutions USA, a subsidiary of global outsourcing company Firstsource Solutions Ltd with headquarters in India.  It says on its website that it is servicing over 900 healthcare providers worldwide, helping these providers “maximize reimbursements and increase cash flow.”

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In the U.S., Firstsource Solutions USA has published job listings for Patient Service Representative, Floater/Trainer, or Team Lead in at a minimum the following states: Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Maine, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio.

Alan Bernardez and Tawanna Pittman, the two lead plaintiffs in the putative collective action, are both former patient service representatives of MedAssist.  At the time they were working for MedAssist in Virginia, they and other similarly situated employees were being given daily and weekly work assignments that cannot be completed in just 40 hours a week.

But the company through its management routinely compelled them not to clock in beyond 40 hours a week.  Bernardez worked for MedAssist for more than 10 years, from April 2006 to November 2016; Pittman worked there for seven years, from October 2010 to May 2017.

The two said that in MedAssist, if the hourly-paid patient service representatives, floaters/trainers and team leads clocked in or out at a time outside of their 8-hour daily work schedule, the time-recording will turn red and would need a manual reset. The employees further allege that they have been pressured and/or reprimanded by the management for not completing their weekly and daily volume of work assignments.  As a result, the employees, according to Bernardez and Pittman, regularly render unpaid work before and after their shift and even during their lunch breaks.

They are seeking unpaid overtime and liquidated damages for the company’s alleged violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under the statute, the company is required to pay them overtime compensation at a rate of not less than one and one-half (1.5) times their regular rate of pay, for work performed over forty (40) hours per week.

The case is Bernardez, et al v. Firstsource Solutions USA, LLC d/b/a MedAssist, Case No. 3:17-cv-00613-DJH ((W.D. Ky.).